Expressions Of Meaning

It is good to be back home after two nights at the monastery. I am not about to spend three years there as Adzel did in the Andes. In fact, although I meditated (see image), attended Dharma talks and read a Buddhist text, I also had Poul Anderson's Rise Of The Terran Empire for private relaxation in the evening. (I was not one of those in sleeping bags on the floor of the meditation hall.)

Poul Anderson conveys meaning not only through the content of what he writes but also through the way he writes it - in colorful allusive language including the pathetic fallacy which is sometimes as integral to his prose as its grammar, e.g.:

"Stars burned many-fold, some among them the color of blood." (See here.)

Buddhists discern meaning not only by meditating and hearing the Dharma but also through ceremonial, e.g., in a zigzag procession, an individual momentarily notices that he is walking in the opposite direction to someone else although both are part of a single movement - as they are in life as a whole? The Buddha's death is remembered in a ceremony where burning candles filling the meditation hall are all extinguished, plunging the hall into total darkness, but are then re-lit from a single candle that has been kept alight outside the hall. Dharma, Sangha and enlightenment still exist two and a half thousand years after His death. Characters like Adzel carry them into the future.

The nonverbal meaning of ceremonies reminded me of the allusive meanings of Anderson's texts. In both cases, the meaning is palpably present though not explicitly stated.